Imparting knowledge about reading and writing a language to a child requires elementary teaching methodologies which aim to deal with learning about distinct sound pattern associated with each letter. A pre-school child falling under the age group of three to five years cannot read written text until he/she learns that how to pronounce each letter in a word. Hence, a method of phonics is used to help learn the language while using phonetics (sounds) of each letter or word that is formed. The word phonics is the preferred method for imparting knowledge about the sounds of letters and letter groups to beginners so they can proficiently read, spell and pronounce new words. Taking the case of the English language, there are pre-defined rules which determine the sounds of the letters and the letter groups.
In the current English phonics method, 44 English phonemes are preferably used to represent distinct sound patterns that can be applied to form distinguished words having distinct sound patterns. For example, the English words “hot” and “hat” are distinguished by the phoneme /o/ and the phoneme /a/ along with /h/ and /t/. However, it has been observed that in an earlier stage of the English language learning process, a learner may find difficulty to grasp 44 phonemes and their respective meanings because of irregularities in spelling of a word and its respective sounds. For example, father should phonetically spelled “fother”. To impart better learning techniques, there may be a need of the phonics system to minimize the number of phonemes to an appropriate number and use age appropriate pictures on top of the letters (in particular, the first two letters of the consonant-vowel-consonant words like “hat”). Further, in the current English phonics method, the preference is given to a correct spelling of the word while teaching the sound pattern of the word. This sometimes creates confusing outcomes and the level of understanding may become open-ended. For example, the English word “word” may be used in the current phonics method to describe an r-controlled “ur” sound which may be slightly confusing to the learner since it can be spelled phonetically spelled as either “werd”, “wird” or “wurd”.
Hence, there is a need for the system and method to define the sound patterns of the sound-spelling entity in an accurate, systematic, and readable manner so that the beginner may proficiently learn the elementary English language while deciphering the correct pronunciation of each word comprising one or more phonemes. In other words, a letter or groups of letters in a given context should not have more than one sound where as in English, the letter or the same group of letters can have multitude of sounds and there is no particular rationale why it should be that way.